Language and Social Change

How did good words become bad ones? Why are many of them inappropriate nowadays? Is language inconstant or are we incapable of making up our minds and leaving words alone so that they keep their original meaning? Some of these questions have crossed the average person’s mind and in some cases they end up unanswered or the questions simply vanish because we are too busy to stop to think about language. The English language vocabulary is full of words that used to mean something different than their current meaning and words that became substitutes of terms which are now considered incorrect. Many words have gone through a process of meaning depreciation and they have developed a negative sense. The following terms testify to how a shift in meaning has brought us from one term to another; idiot, feebleminded, retarded and mentally challenged, and the list goes on. What it is that causes these terms to get so quickly spoiled, and more so in our modern society? This paper will describe the changes in the terminology regarding people with intellectual disabilities and the reasons why many terms have been needed. It will focus on the social and historical changes that have influenced the modification of these terms and also the way in which language itself has played an important role in this process. In order to better understand when and why these semantic changes occurred we will look to etymology and semantics. The former as the field which studies the origins of a word and the latter has to do with the actual meaning of words.

English has been continuously changing throughout history. In fact one of the things we need to keep in mind is that “English” is really three Englishes: old, middle, and modern” (Hayes 2012: 5). During these three periods the language suffered a metamorphosis that left us with a conglomerate of English variations. We were left with words that despite being etymologically related they do not continue to be connected in meaning. Such shifts...